Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Transhumanism goes back to campus

Their reaction was one of shock mixed with an
apprehension for the years ahead of them. Certainly not my intent and I was
fortunately able to bring the discourse back around to one of balance and even,
dare I say, optimism. These students were, however, first semester freshmen. While
they were indeed a generation of digital natives, they were also doe-eyed and
tatterdemalion in the face of that daunting experience that is the first few
months of college. It was a gamble that they had any sleep the night before and
could remember what building the lecture hall was. And there I was talking to
them about concepts like cybernetics.

Surely, I thought, I would not have the same reception
teaching my semester-long course on transhumanism to second semester seniors.
These would be seasoned veterans after all. Tempered and forged in four (three
and one half, anyway) years of critical thinking, they would at least be aware
of how technology is changing the human experience, if not humanity itself.
They would be able to entertain a concept while disagreeing with it. Certainly
they would receive the notion of the Singularity with an at least measured
response.

No, it was pretty much the same...only with a bit less
crying.

I exaggerate. A little. Let me back up a bit.

The class started last January. It did indeed cover the
technical aspects of transhumanism but the focal point of the entire course was
ethics. Should we or shouldn’t we be
doing these things? What are the benefits? What are the consequences? What do
you think?

When we met for the last time two weeks
ago, I asked the class for a few final thoughts on transhumanism. These were
their responses with names changed to protect privacy.

“I never even knew any of this stuff existed,” said Alyssa,
a 22 year-old majoring in athletic training.

I expressed shocked. They’ve never known a world without an
Internet and they have only the dimmest of memories of life without mobile
devices. Why is something like artificial intelligence such a fear leap?

“But computers that can think for themselves? That’s
different,” she responded. “And I never even knew what nanotechnology was
before taking this class.”

“There were so many times where I left this class having an
existential crisis,” said Veronica, a soon-to-be school social worker. “Where
are things like artificial intelligence taking us? What does it even mean to be
human anymore?”

As is the case with many people, not simply college students,
it is sometimes easiest to express things in pop culture terms. Lance, a graduating
senior who had just accepted a position with a marketing firm, put his change
of thoughts this way:

“When I would hear about robots or ‘machines that can think,’
R2-D2 and C-3PO were the first things that would come to my mind,” he said. “I
never considered that there might one day be an Ultron.”

“There are no strings on me...” I answered, doing my best
James Spader and getting a collective shudder from the class.

“Who needs the meatbags?” Lance responded through a laugh,
imitating Bender from Futurama.

“I don’t know. I feel hopeful.”

That came from Jessica. She’s a psychology student on her
way to grad school.

“If I...god forbid...get in a car wreck sometime in the
future and lose a limb or something, there may be cybernetics that can help me
still live the life that I want to,” she said. “If I get cancer, there may be
nanotech that will help me get better.”

“At first, my reaction was to reject all of this and say it’s
wrong. But this is happening,” said Kate, a major in mass communications. “We’re
going to have devices that are autonomous and self-aware. We need to deal with
it.”

My interest piqued, I asked Kate just what she was
proposing.

“Education,” she answered simply. “People need to know about
things like AI. And as we develop super AI, we need to do so with our own sense
of ethics in mind. We need to give it a moral compass.”

One student named Matt reminded us of a discussion in the
months previous. Rev. Christopher Benek, a Presbyterian pastor, wrote an op/ed
piece about AI. Benek asserted that AI could “participate in Christ’s
redemptive purposes” and “help to make the world a better place.”

“But I don’t believe in god and neither do a lot of other
folks,” Veronica said. “So I have to place my faith in people. And I don’t know
if we can make the right decisions with this stuff.”

“Then we will need education in ethics just as much as our
devices will,” Kate said. “None of the technology that we’ve talked about is
really good or bad. It’s all going to be in what we decide to do with it.”

Kate stole my closing line. She really did. While there were
undoubtedly students from the class who

will be just fine if they never hear
the terms “nanotechnology” or “genetic engineering” again, Kate got the takeaway
if there indeed was any single one. Whether transhumanism results in a utopia,
a dystopia, or the more likely muddy middle, it will not be due to the technology
itself but rather it will result from our choices as a species.

After seeing the work of my students, I am left with a bit
of hope those choices will be good ones.

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I am a writer and academic in the Chicago area. I blog about many things, including the writing of science fiction by drawing upon its "real life" inspirations, such as the paranormal.
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